Bière de Garde with Extended Boil

My first brew of 2016 was also my first attempt at making something like a classic
bière de garde.  I have a few malty saisons cut with red sours that could probably pass for interpretations of the style, but here I wanted to make something closer to the stronger, malt-forward beers described in Phil Markowski's Farmhouse Ales.
Initially my plan was to make something along the lines of the 'Bière de Garde - Artisanal Brewery Version' on p.89 of that book, which relies on an array of specialty malts 'to yield a greater complexity and depth of malt flavour'.  However, as I was flicking through the rest of the book, my attention rested on the following short note on simpler single-malt grain bills:

This approach to malt grist formulation might be more appropriate if a longer keeping time (six months or more) is desired for a bière de garde.  As the beer ages and slowly reacts with oxygen (ingress through the bottle closure) the malt character will intensify and come into its own over a period of six to twelve months.  A formulation containing a larger degree of specialty malts (Munich, Aromatic, Biscuit, etc.) may become 'too malty' over an equivalent aging period.

Since I'm planning on ageing this beer for quite a while, I decided to change my original plans and go for a much simpler grist.

Something else also caught my eye in the simpler recipe for a 'Bière de Garde - Large Brewery Version' on p.88.  In the notes below the recipe, Markowski says:

An extended boil (two or three hours) will add complexity and character.  This grist formulation will yield a bière de garde suitable for longer-term storage (greater than six months).

I'd been meaning to experiment with longer boils for a while, prompted in part by conversations with Andrew Addkison from The Farmhouse Obsession.  Boil-length and intensity was one of the ways in which traditional brewers could control the flavour profile of their beer without relying on the array of specialty malts we have access to today.  As Yvan de Baets mentions in his essay in Farmhouse Ales, longer brews were also characteristic of at least some historical farmhouse ales:

The boil lasted five to eight hours and sometimes up to fifteen hours "due to the generally accepted opinion that beer kept better the longer it boiled". This resulted in a deeper coloured wort, intensified by the fact that the copper boiling kettles were generally heated by open fire. (p.107)

Longer boils are also associated with traditional lambic brewing, and I think they might add some interesting complexity to my pale sour soleras.

With all this in mind, I decided to try making a bière de garde with a simple grist of 80% pilsner and 20% Golden Promise, hopefully getting some colour and complexity from an extended four and a half hour boil.  The planned O.G. was 1.075, with bitterness and hop character coming from some French Aramis hops.

The extended boil took some extra planning, since with my full-volume BIAB mash I couldn't fit all the liquor I'd need in the kettle.  The solution was simple, holding back some water until after the mash, then adding it back before the start of the boil.

I do my brewing on the stove-top, placing the kettle across two burners, which together provide enough heat for a moderately vigorous boil, as you can see in the following video:

I removed a small sample of wort at the start of the boil, and then roughly every 40-50 minutes afterwards.  As you can see from this picture, the change in colour over the course of the whole boil was quite striking.  The turbidity of the final sample (hops and protein) doesn't do full justice to its dark colour:



I fermented the beer using a kolsch strain (Wyeast 2565).  I'm also planning to add a small pitch of brettanomyces for a slow secondary fermentation, probably the Wyeast Clausenii strain.  Contemporary wisdom has it that brettanomyces doesn't really have a place in bière de garde.  Here's Gordon Strong on the topic in his new book:

[Bière de garde] is a widely misunderstood outside of France because of the condition of their exported beers. The style doesn't have a musty, cellar-like quality; that is something that comes from dried-out corks used in old bottles.  Some imported examples were fruity due to oxidation.

This is almost certainly right when it comes to contemporary versions of the style, but if it really does have its roots in French farmhouse brewing, a secondary fermentation by brettanomyces doesn't seem completely out of place in a beer intended for a long-term storage.  If nothing else, it will help to dry things out, and perhaps add some interesting complexity.  Since I'm not planning to enter this in any competitions, I don't care if its considered 'to style'.  I might even add a light dry-hop, or just use the whole batch for blending...

Brewing Saisons: Some Thoughts on Process

I've brewed a lot of beers since April, most of them saisons, but as the temperatures start to get hotter and the school year wraps up, I'm starting to think about stopping brewing for the summer.  This is partly because I'll be going back to England for a month, but also because brewing in a hot and humid apartment is just not much fun.  I'm sure I'll fit in a couple of batches, but the next proper series of beers I have planned will be the top-ups for my soleras in preparation for a blending project at the start of the Autumn.

I'll probably find time to post here occasionally---I need to write tasting notes for a number of batches---but I'll be updating this blog's Facebook page more often than I write posts here.  I'm hoping I'll find time to go through some more old brewing texts, and I'll post anything interesting I find on that page.

Rather than write up brew day posts for the saisons I've been making recently, I thought I'd write a post summarizing some of the changes I've made in my brewing process during this most recent round of saisons.  This isn't supposed to be a general overview of saison brewing---for that, I can't think of a better guide than this post at Spontaneous Funk---but rather a summary of some of the changes I've made that might be of interest to anyone trying to brew lower gravity saisons (many commercial versions come in at 6% ABV or higher, whereas I aim for 4-5% ABV).  I'll come back to these points as I write tasting notes this summer, and try to see what kind of effect they have on the final products.  When I start brewing again after the summer, I'll be focusing more closely on water chemistry and pH during my brew day process, which will probably lead to a few more changes.

1. Carbonation

I'll start with one of the more obvious ones: aiming for a higher level of carbonation, somewhere around 3 volumes.  This probably seems obvious to anyone whose drank a lot of commercial saisons, since many if not most have fairly spritzy carbonation.  But the truth is, I didn't really start brewing these beers in emulation of commercial versions.  Instead I was captivated by Yvan de Baets' description of historical saisons in his essay in Farmhouse Ales, and set about trying to brew the kinds of beer he described.  My frame of reference was therefore a bit limited: I knew I liked Saison Dupont, but I hadn't tried many other Belgian versions beyond the beers from De La Senne and De Ranke, and I didn't like the bigger American saisons I'd had at that time.  This meant I took my starting point from the bitter, low alcohol English beers I'd been brewing up to that point (part of what intigued me in Yvan's essay was that the beers he described seemed to combine the best parts of bitter, with the complexities of lambic), and that meant aiming for a lower volume of CO2 in order to prevent the beer from seeming harsh and thin.

I still tend to prefer lower levels of carbonation in most beers, but after drinking many more Belgian saisons I want to try to capture the striking appearance these beers have when they're poured, with those thick moussey heads rising inches above the glass.  Higher levels of carbonation seem essential to acheiving this, so I'm going to aim for at least 3 volumes of CO2 for a while to see how I like the results.  (This is a little inconvenient as I don't have enough heavy bottles in rotation to package every beer, even after a recent group buy for champagne bottles.)

2. Cereal Mash With Unmalted Adjuncts

These next two points follow on from the last.  Higher carbonation risks making the beers seem harsh and sharp, at least to my palate, especially when dealing with the low alcohol saisons I like to brew.  My thought is that one way around this might be to include large volumes of unmalted grains in the grist to provide some mouthfeel and body.  Saison lore has it that farmers would use whatever unmalted grains they had available in their beers, and as I've mentioned before I usually have grains like spelt on hand for baking bread (I've started buying buckwheat explicitly for brewing, but I'll probably try baking with it soon as well).

Most of these grains require a cereal mash, which is a bit of a nuisance and certainly lengthens my brew day.  I could probably achieve something of the same affect by using flaked adjuncts like wheat and oats, but this would limit the grains I could use, and I also wonder whether the unmalted grains don't make a more distinctive flavour combination than their malted or flaked counterparts.  I love the savoury smells you get from a cereal mash with spelt or buckwheat, and I'm hoping some of that will come across in my beers (as I think it does in commercial beers like Saison D'Epeautre or Duchessic).

3.  Step Mash With Protein Rest

In his article on brewing saisons, Joe Stange suggested that including a protein rest and using undermodified malts might be key to achieving the thick head characteristic of beers like Saison Dupont.  I've been roughly following the schedule described in Farmhouse Ales, with protein rests at 113 and 131 (I often skip the first one), and then longer rests in the mid 140s and 150s. Since I'm doing a cereal mash anyway, its pretty easy to use this hot porridge to speed up the transition between steps, and the adjuncts should provide plenty of extra protein.  (I suspect that ideally the adjuncts should be in the main mash for the protein rest, whereas its more convenient for me to add them back to the main mash to get from the low 130s to the 140s.  I've tried both ways, and I'll try to note any obvious difference in the results).

4. Oak and Fermentation

This is another idea to improve the mouthfeel and overall flavour profile of my beers, inspired largely by listening this this old interview with Shea Comfort, in which he talks very knowledgeably about the uses of oak in fermentation.  One big takeaway is that judicious use of oak can improve the structure of a beer, rounding out and accentuating certain elements of its flavour profile, while also prolonging its life-span.  Comfort talks about different ways of using oak cubes, but the one that caught my attention was adding them for primary fermentation.  This seems to lead to a more subtle contribution, as many of the compounds associated with oak (vanillin in particular) are processed by the yeast during primary fermentation.  The hosts of the show taste three of Shea's beers in the final segment, the first of which is a Belgian beer fermented in  with oak cubes in the primary, and everyone seemed to agree that the contribution of the oak was very subtle, to the point where you might not even realize it had been used (unless you recognized its other effects).  This sounds like exactly what I'm looking for, and also echoes some comments I've heard certain brewers make on The Sour Hour about the contribution barrels make to their beer (i.e. that its not about tasting oak).

For now I've started experimenting by adding between 10-15 grams of freshly boiled oak cubes to the wort along with the pitch of yeast (only in one beer so far---hopefully in another if I find time to brew this week).  I'll see how I like these results, and if it works well I may start doing this regularly with most of my saison-style beers.

5. Yeast Blends and Cell Counts

I've covered this already in an earlier post.  Unfortunately two of those beers spent a bit too long in primary fermenters that allow in a lot of oxygen, and they may both have unacceptable levels of acetic acid.  I'll make that call in the next few weeks.  But I used one of the blends in several beers, so I'll have the opportunity for some comparison.  Since I'm probably done brewing for the next few months I might not get a chance to use them again, but if I like the results it won't be too hard to recreate them.

One thing that's come out of making these blends is that I'm gradually getting more comfortable with using my microscope to perform cell counts.  I did this for the last few saisons that I brewed, using the calculator at Mr. Malty to get an ideal pitching rate and then measuring out the requisite amount of each slurry after performing a cell count.  One thing that was striking here was how little slurry I needed, relative to what I'd been pitching before,  Overpitching isn't the worst thing you can do to a beer, but it may have had an effect on the way the yeast expressed itself, so I'm curious to see what difference this has.

Modifying a Corona-style Mill

My plan to write some tasting notes for the blog this week was thwarted by a lingering cold that left me unable to taste much of anything.  It hasn't stopped me brewing though, and after a disastrous start to the brewing year (I scorched a hole in my BIAB bag and spilt grain all over the kitchen), I finally feel like I'm getting back in the swing of things.  I have a few interesting batches planned for the next few weeks, and I'm feeling quite excited about how some of the saisons currently going through secondary fermentations in my closets are tasting.  With any luck, in a few months I should have some very nice beer on hand.  I also won a couple more medals in a local competition, which was a pleasant surprise since I didn't expect much from the beers I entered.  I have one beer that I think is very good entered into the Upper Mississippi Mashout next weekend, and I'm curious to see how it does.

One thing that's helped me get back to brewing despite the fact that I've been quite busy is that, after crushing almost 200 batches by hand with my cheap knockoff Corona-style mill, I finally went to the hardware store (a two minute walk from my apartment) and bought the fifty cent bolt I needed to run it with a drill.  The 5/16" bolt screws into where the handle should be, and you can turn it (and thus the plates of the mill) by using a drill with a socket adapter.

Making that first change was pretty easy, but when I crushed the grain for my next batch (a dry stout) I noticed that the crush was pretty uneven, with lots of whole grains visible in the grist.  I went ahead and brewed anyway, but my efficiency took a significant hit: almost 10 points, not something you want to happen with a dry stout, which already risks being too bitter and astringent because of all the hops and roasted grains.  I fermented the batch anyway (it was doing double duty as a starter for a new pitch of Wyeast 1318), and as predicted its tasting a bit harsh.

The problem was pretty obvious: the plates on this kind of mill are often quite wobbly, which means that the gap between them doesn't stay even while you're crushing it.  Usually, when I'm turning it slowly by hand, this isn't too much of a problem, but with the drill turning everything much faster a lot more uncrushed grain was getting through.

There are a couple of modifications you can make to these mills to help prevent the plates wobbling.  I didn't bother with then when I bought it because the crush was OK and I was getting acceptable efficiency, but now I knew I had to try them.  The first is to add a couple of spacers on the adjustment bolts between the two sides of the mill---you can find some good pictures here.  The second is to take out the cotter pin that holds the front plate in place---mine looked like it had been bashed in with a hammer, and took a while to get out---and replace it with a 8/32 inch bolt that will hold the plate firmly in place (see picture).  That was an extra 12 cents, and took all of ten minutes.

After making those modifications, I ran a few handfuls of grain through the mill to see how the crush looked and adjusted the gap until I was happy with it.  Corona-style mills will really tear up the hulls of the grain, and can also produce a lot of flour, but since I'm doing BIAB I don't have to worry about stuck sparges and the like.  I'm also pretty careful about mash pH, which helps reduce tannin-extraction from the grain. There were certainly fewer intact hulls left after using the drill, and a bit more flour too, but I knew I could probably minimize this by conditioning the grain (i.e. spraying it with water) before I crushed it.

Midway through last week I brewed another batch in the evening (a top-up for my pale solera), and crushed all of the grain in the mill. I was a bit worried about my cheap drill overheating and burning out, but it made it through and the grist looked OK, with the crush fairly even and not too much flour (see picture).  I went ahead and brewed, and got an efficiency boost, ending up 3 points over my target O.G.  Today I brewed again---this time a pale bitter---and conditioned the grain a few hours before crushing it.  This seemed to help preserve the hulls more than the first time, when I conditioned it about 12 hours in advance.  And today I hit my target O.G. dead on.

All in all I'm pretty happy with these modifications.  They mean I can crush the grist for my batches in a fraction of the time it used to take me (I'd say about 5 minutes each for these two, where before it would have been more like 30).  I like to crush the grain the night before I brew so that I can get everything going nice and early the next day, but recently I'd been finding that I was often too tired to do this prep, which usually meant that I didn't brew at all.  What's more I have a few high gravity batches planned for the next few weeks, and I always used to dread crushing the grain for that kind of thing---not any more!

I will have to keep any eye on the flavour of my beer---I haven't noticed any astringency from the grain before now, but perhaps the more thorough crush will lead to problems.  I'll also probably need a better drill (I have my eye on this one), but for now I'll keep using my cheap one until it gives up on me.

Brew Day: Sour Red Ale (plus Yeast Choice for Sour Beers)

As I've mentioned here before, I'm pretty interested in the links between the brewing traditions of Belgium and England, and in particular the effects that brettanomyces and LAB might have had on historical English stock ales.  I'm planning a couple more semi-historical brews in the next few months, but today I thought it would be interesting to try something completely different.  Rather than base my beer on a historical recipe, I came up with a pretty standard home brew recipe for a Flanders Red, and then substituted British ingredients for the Belgian ones.  The result looks nothing like any of the historical recipes for English stock ales I've seen on Ron Pattinson's blog or in his book (my main sources for this kind of thing).  There's too much crystal malt, no brewing sugar, and the hopping is pitifully low compared to the massive quantities in these old recipes.  It makes me wonder about how recipes for Flanders beers have changed over the past few centuries.  For instance, did they also previously rely on brewing sugars and smallish quantities of roasted malt for colour?  Presumably, if sourness was a goal, they might not have been hopped so aggressively---but then again, the hopping rates in lambics are on a par with these English stock ales, though typically with aged rather than fresh hops. Are recipes for porters and stock ales from the 1860s a good guide to the beers Eugene Rodenbach brewed when he returned to Belgium after working in England?  Was there a tradition of red and brown sour ales in the region before then?    I still don't know very much about the historical connections between the traditions behind these beers, but I'm sure some of this information is out there to find.

Anyway, I figured this recipe would produce a nice sour red ale, and I'm looking forward to the results, though I don't have any clear idea of how it might differ from a standard Flanders Red.  The general consensus seems to be that there is plenty of variation between malts from different countries---not just in the obvious cases (i.e. compare pilsner to Maris Otter), but also between things like crystal malts rated at the same colour level.  Perhaps this will result in subtle (or not so subtle!) differences in the final beer; or perhaps the sourness and funk will cover all of this up.  I don't have enough experience with different maltsters to hazard a guess here. I'm planning to use Wyeast 1318 for primary fermentation (much more on that below!), and then to use a small amount of a year old Flanders Red (perhaps along with some of its yeast cake) to inoculate the new beer as I rack the old one onto a blend of sour cherries and raspberries.

One thing I was thinking about while formulating this recipe was the difference that using an English yeast might make to the final beer---and on thinking this through, I came to the conclusion that I should be using English strains much more frequently when brewing sours.  I thought I'd indulge myself and type up these ramblings.  For those interested, the recipe for this beer is at the end of the post.

Yeast Choice and Sour Beer

I started with the thought there are two or three key things to think about when it comes to saccharomyces strains for sour beers:

1. The amount of fermentable sugars they will leave for the lactic-acid producing bacteria.
2. The precursors for brettanomyces-produced compounds they will leave in the fermented beer.
3. The flavour contribution the strain will make to the final beer (assuming the flavours it produces survive the activity of the brettanomyces and bugs).

The significance of (1) is pretty obvious: if you want a sour beer, you need to make sure that the lactic-acid producing bacteria have enough fermentables to produce acid-levels to your taste.  One way of making sure there is plenty of sugars for the bugs is to use a strain of saccharomyces with a low attenuation rate for primary fermentation.  English yeast strains are obvious candidates here, since with the right handling they will finish with relatively high final gravities.  Of course, there are plenty of other ways to achieve the same result with more attenuative strains---mashing high, under-pitching, adding starches.  So (1) is inconclusive, but certainly doesn't speak against using an English strain.

With (2), however, things get more interesting.  Thanks to research by people like Chad Yakobson, home brewers are beginning to grip on the ways in which by-products of primary fermentation act as precursors for different flavours created by the ongoing activity of brettanomyces.  This set of slides from a talk by Chad Yakobson provides a good summary of some of his research; there's also information on this in Wild Brews and American Sour Beers; and there's more information in this thread on HBT.  

For now, the following will do as a rough and ready summary (based on my limited understanding of the science).  Phenols from the brettanomyces tend to yield the funkier flavours: barnyard, band-aid, medicinal, smoke.  Esters produced by brettanomyces tend to yield fruitier flavours: pineapple is a commonly-mentioned example.

With this knowledge, a brewer who wanted to produce a funky beer might try to increase the precursors for phenol production available to the brettanomyces.  There are various ways to do this (again, see Chad's slides), but the most relevant is by using a POF+ yeast, since these produce the 4-vinyl compounds that brettanomyces can convert into the relevant phenols.  The commonly used example of a POF+ yeast is hefeweizen strains, which produce distinctive clove phenolics---but many other commonly used Belgian strains such as Wyeast 3522 (Ardennes) and 3787 (Trappist High Gravity) are also counted as POF+ (according to a presentation I listened to by Stan Hieronymus from the 2014 AHA conference),  

So, using a POF+ Belgian strain will encourage the production of phenols by brettanomyces, increasing the levels of funkier flavours and aromas in the final beer.  What's more, since phenols seem to have an additive or synergistic effect, the phenolic character of Belgian yeast might also add to the overall perception of phenol-related flavours and aromas.

On the other hand, a brewer who wanted to minimize funky flavours might try to minimize these precursors, and an obvious way to do this is to use a less phenolic yeast strains: lager strains (used by New Belgium), the Chico strain (recommended by Jamil Zainasheff)....or an English strain.  

What about the other side: the fruitier flavours associated with esters?  Based on what I've been able to find out so far, the precursors for these are organic acids which come from a variety of sources, including the activity of enterobacter in spontaneously inoculated wort, dying yeast cells, and fatty acids in aged hops (all relevant to lambic production).  I haven't been able to find any evidence that esters themselves might provide the relevant compounds in a manner usable by brettanomyces, so that an ester-producing English strain might also be a source of precursors that result in some unique brett-derived esters.  The plausibility of this thought might be obvious to someone who actually understands the science behind all of this, but I do not.  What does seem to be true is that esters also have an additive or synergistic effect, so that at the very least, the combined ester production of the saccharomyces and brettanomyces might increase the overall perception of fruity flavours in the final beer.

Of course, this could easily back fire on you.  Just as too many phenols can make a beer taste like band-aids or medicine, too many esters could leave you with a beer that tastes like nail-polish remover or solvents.  Eugh.  So in both cases, a balance is required, especially if you're adding brettanomyces.

How to put this information to use in chosing a yeast strain?  Well, it depends what kind of beer you want to brew.  There are plenty of threads on HBT where people ask how to brew the funkiest beer possible.  A good answer would be: use a POF+ yeast, and take other steps to encourage the production of phenols. But when I envisage the kind of sour beer I'd like to brew, I think of something characterised by soft fruitiness with a low-level but definite funk in the background.  English yeast strains might be a great candidate for producing something along these lines.  Even if they don't lead to new esters from the activity of the brettanomyces, they might still produce the right levels of fruitiness and funk after secondary fermentation.

What about (3), the contribution the saccharomyces makes to the flavour profile of the final beer?  Since brettanomyces has a tendency to mix up all the flavours produced by primary fermentation, its hard to predict how much of this will survive.  But when I was formulating this recipe, I had in mind the gentle and balanced fruitiness that is produced by something like Wyeast 1318 (London Ale III).  This is one of my favourite strains, and besides its soft profile it also has the interesting quality of leaving a slight perceived sweetness in the finished beer that seems to be independent of the final gravity (i.e. if you compare it to other strains fermenting identical wort to the same F.G., it will still seem sweeter---but the sweetness isn't the cloying kind that comes from unfermented sugars).  If any of that flavour profile survived into the finished beer, it could make for a phenomenal Flanders Red!  

Of course, if the brettanomyces accentuated the estery flavours of a strain, or even produced new flavours along the same lines, even more possibilities would present themselves.  Imagine the stone fruit esters produced by something like Wyeast 1469 (and other strains of English origin) dialed up against a background of sourness and light funk. I think that could work really well.  (On the other hand, if it dialed up the banana flavours that Wyeast 1469 sometimes spits out, it could be pretty gross...)

Well, enough of my ramblings.  This is all a roundabout way of saying that I'm going to start using English strains in any sour beer that is not a saison or berlinerweisse or the like from now on!

Recipe:

Measured O.G: 1.054
Measured F.G:

Mash: 153.5°F:

Malt:

39.6%  Paul's Mild Malt

26.4%  TF Golden Promise
18.5%  TF Pearl
7.9%  Medium Crystal
3.5%  TF Dark Crystal II
3.5%  Torrified Wheat
0.5%  Black Patent

Hops:

EKG          60          20 IBUs

Yeast:

Wyeast 1318

Repetition: Ordinary Bitter, Water Treatment, and Carbonation

First Beer

This weekend I brewed a version of the Ordinary Bitter I made earlier this year.  As I begin to pay more attention to the details of my brewing, I find that I'm much more inclined to return to the same recipes over and over again, tweaking the ingredients or other aspects of the process so that I get a better understanding of how all of this affects the final beer.

Earlier this summer I attempted an experiment in this spirit.  On two subsequent weekends, I brewed two identical Bitters, keeping everything the same apart from the water treatment for the mash.  I was hoping to get a better understanding of how mineral additions and mash pH shaped the flavours of my beer, and perhaps to start to work out what my own preferences were here.  Things didn't quite go according to plan, as I'll explain below---but I still feel that I learnt a lot, and I'm inclined to start doing this kind of thing more often.

The recipe for the beers was fairly simple: Golden Promise and invert #2, with additions of EKG and Fuggles in the first half of the boil, and Styrian Goldings towards the end.  I fermented both beers with Wyeast 1469, cropping and pitching from one to the next.  (Some people might be able to recognize the inspiration for this beer from this description.)  I wanted something fairly straight-forward and familiar so that any differences would be more obvious.

Chicago has pretty great water for brewing: its low in most minerals and tastes fine (to me) once its been filtered for chlorine.  The one problem is that it has fairly high residual alkalinity, which can make it difficult to hit a mash pH in the right range when brewing pale beers.  I usually deal with this by a combination of acid and mineral additions.  My aim with these beers was to work out (a) whether I had any preference between relying more on acid than minerals, or vice versa; and (b) whether higher levels of either affected the flavour profile positively or negatively.

To this end, I brewed one beer with a relatively large addition of lactic acid (5ml), and smaller additions of gypsum (3.2g) and calcium chloride (1.6g).  According to Bru'n Water, this gave me a mash with the following water profile:

         Calcium: 84.6               Magnesium: 11.8        
         Sodium 8.4                  Sulfate 106.3
         Chloride: 49.3              Bicarbonate: -44.2        
         Total Hardness: 260     Residual Alkalinity: -107

For the second batch, I lowered the amount of lactic acid to 3.5ml, and increased the gypsum to 6.9g and the calcium chloride to 3.2g.  This gives the following profile:

         Calcium: 140.9            Magnesium: 11.8        
         Sodium 8.4                  Sulfate 195.6
         Chloride: 83.1              Bicarbonate: 18.8        
         Total Hardness: 401     Residual Alkalinity: -92

Both mashes should have been in the 5.2-5.4 pH range (I didn't record the predicted pH for the first, but for the second it was 5.4).

On brew day, I took measurements during the first 15 minutes of the mash, and then throughout the rest of the process.  I was still getting the hang of using my pH meter, so the measurements may be a little off, particularly for the first beer, as I was taking a reading too early:

• Mash pH: at the start of the mash, the first beer settled at around 5.2, while the second settled at 5.4.  By the end of the mash, both beers were in the mid 5.4s.
• Boil: after 30 minutes of the boil, before the first hop addition, the pH of the first beer was 5.21.  I forgot to take a measurement for the second.
• Beginning of Fermentation: the pH of the first beer was 5.31, whereas the pH of the second beer was 5.2.
• Final beer (from bottle): the first beer finished at 4.04, whereas the second beer finished at 3.99

So as you can see, there appears to be some variation in the pH throughout.  I can't make much sense of the numbers, since the first beer started with a lower pH, but ended up with a higher one.  This makes me wonder if I didn't screw up my measurements of the first beer through inexperience with my pH meter.  Either way, both beers were in the right range during the mash.

Of course, these numbers are really besides the point: the real question is how the beers taste, and this is where things went a little awry.  Both are turned out fine in terms of cleanness of flavours, etc.  The Golden Promise really shines through in this recipe, and the bitterness is pleasantly bracing without being too harsh (though more on that below).  I don't detect any of the lactic acid in either. But the second beer attenuated several points further than the first, and this makes it difficult to compare them with each other. Both started at 1.037, but the first attenuated to 1.012, whereas the second went all the way to 1.008.  This means that the beer with more mineral additions is also drier and thinner, and that skews my perception of its flavours.

I'm not sure why one attenuated further than the other.  I tried to keep my process identical across the two brew days, but with no ability to measure pitching rates, I simply eye-balled what seemed to be a reasonable amount of top-cropped yeast, and I suspect I pitched a larger quantity of healthy yeast into the second batch.  This was also the third generation of this particular pitch of yeast.  I noticed as I went on that it became increasingly attenuative across each generation.  This always happens to some extent, but this time I was paying closer attention to the numbers, and I was surprised by how much the attenuation increased in later generations (frankly, it over-attenuated in both Old World's Mantra and Stingo).  Since I haven't seen any other signs of an infection, I'm assuming this is just because I was pitching large quantities of very healthy yeast; but of course, I can't rule out the possibility that somewhere along the line some other organisms got into my pitches and was cropped along with this yeast.

Either way, it makes direct comparison difficult, because the first beer has more body and residual sweetness than the second.  Both are bitter and dry, the second more so than the first; but I don't know how much of that to attribute to the lower F.G., and how much is a result of the differing water profiles.

Second Beer

Here's where it gets interesting.  With the larger part of both batches, I followed my usually practice of bottle-conditioning with table sugar, aiming for around 1.8 volumes of carbonation.  From a bottle, I definitely prefer the first beer.  The very slight residual sweetness provides a nice balance for the bitterness, and gives more expression to the almost cracker-like flavours of the malt.  In contrast, the second beer seems almost too dry, a little harsh, and generally more one-dimensional (though still perfectly enjoyable in itself).

However, I also tried conditioning a small portion of each batch in a Cubitainer, in an attempt to mimic cask-conditioned beer at home.  This wasn't enough of a success to warrant a post yet (I'm going to try again with the Quarter Session bitter I brewed this weekend), but it did mean than I got to try both beers with a lower level of carbonation, around 1.3 volumes.  Here I definitely preferred the second beer: the first seemed a little too sweet, whereas the second was very drinkable.

This really opened my eyes to how much the slightly higher levels of carbonation achieved in bottle-conditioning can affect the flavours of a beer.  I realised that, from a bottle, the residual sweetness of the first beer managed to balance the carbonic bite of the CO2, whereas the second beer was too dry and ended up tasting thin and a little harsh.  From a cubitainer, on the other hand, where the carbonation was lower, the first beer tasted overly sweet, whereas the dryness and bitterness of the second really stood out.  I also significantly preferred both beers from a Cubitainer rather than a bottle; higher levels of carbonation really scrub out a lot of the more subtle flavours in a low-gravity beer like this.  I kind of knew that already, but hadn't seen so clearly the extent to which it was true.

So, while I didn't really learn what I set out to regarding water treatment and mash pH, I did learn something interesting about serving Ordinary Bitters at home.  Hopefully I can get the cubitainers working well, in which case I'll be able to brew something closer to the beers I miss from back in the U.K.  If not, it might be worth mashing higher and under-pitching so that bottle-conditioned beers have more residual sweetness to stand up against the bite of the CO2.

Process: Adjuncts, Starches, and Sour Beers

The second beer I brewed over the Labour Day weekend was a pale sour inspired loosely by the practices of Belgian lambic makers.  I say loosely because I did not perform a turbid mash, and I pitched a vial of ECY01 rather than allowing the wort to be inoculated by ambient microbes.  But I did try to produce a starchy wort by other means, and its that process that I want to describe in this post.

The basic idea is to add some starch to the wort at some point after the enzymes from the mash have been denatured, so that this starch is not broken down and makes its way into the fermenting beer; while the Saccharomyces will be unable to ferment it, the Brettanomyces and other bacteria are capable of breaking the starch down into sugars and eventually fermenting it out.  

I first got the idea to do this from an interview with Dave Marliave of Flat Tail Brewing on this episode of the Sunday Session .  In the interview, Marliave describes adding flaked oats to wort post-boil to mimic the starchy wort produced by the turbid mash that lambic brewers use. He states that these starches take much longer to breakdown and ferment out than other complex sugars, so that the overall effect is to prolong the lifecycle of the beer.  It might mean, for instance, that a sour brewed in this way still had some residual sweetness and body a year or two into fermentation, and might continue to develop over a longer period.  So the idea here is not just to provide food for the bacteria so that they produce enough acid (this might also be achieved by mashing high or adding maltodextrin); its to extend the life of the beer, and change the way its flavour profile develops over time.

The method I use is a variation of the one that Marliave describes.  After I've raised my mash to mash-out temperatures and removed the bag with the grist, I add another small mesh bag filled with between 100-200g of flaked oats.  I steep these in the wort for five to ten minutes while I bring it up to a boil, then remove them and give the bag a quick squeeze.  The result is a very cloudy and turbid wort, as you can see from the photo at the start of the post.

When I first heard the interview, I started this thread on HBT to see if other people had used the technique.  If you browse through it, you can find links to other people trying the same kind of thing: some use flaked oats, others add flour to the boil.  This episode of Basic Brewing Radio includes an interviewer with a home brewer who adds pasta to her secondary fermenters with the same goal in mind.

This is the second time I've used the process.  The first beer I brewed is around nine months old at this point, and I took a quick sample this week before writing this post.  So far, the results are promising, and in line with what Marliave describes.  The beer is still a bit turbid, but has cleared considerably over the course of the year.  I have no way of knowing how much of this is breakdown of starches and how much precipitation of proteins etc.  The aroma was mainly lemons and light funk, and the beer tasted lightly sour with some noticeable residual sweetness and body.  At this point it is not a particularly exciting beer, but at nine months old its still relatively young, and I plan on leaving it for at least another six to eight months before I even think about bottling it.

The two batches I brewed this weekend were based on a fairly straight-forward lambic style wort: 60% pilsner and 40% malted wheat.  A few months ago I went through my freezer and took out a bunch of hops from the 2011 harvest and earlier and put them in a brown paper bag in my brew closet to speed up their ageing.  They could probably used a few more months, but I decided to use 30-40g per batch anyway.  Since I was not relying on inoculation from ambient microbes, I didn't need the bacteriostatic properties of the hops to check unwanted bacteria.  But there's some evidence that fatty acids and other products of oxidation in aged hops can be converted by brettanomyces into the ester compounds characteristic of aged sour beers (see p.42 of American Sour Beers for brief discussion of this research), and that seems like reason enough to try using them.

Once primary fermentation is over, I plan to combine 5 gallons in a Better Bottle, which I may end up treating as another solera.  The remaining gallon or so will be aged in jugs, but I plan on blending it with another saison in a few months and then letting this mature for a year or so.

Bread and Beer: Spelt

Whole Grain Loaf with Sprouted Spelt

Brewing and baking complement each other in various ways: key to both is an understanding of the logic behind your process, the stages of fermentation in the product, and the ways in which modification in the former can shape the latter and change the flavour profile of whatever it is you are making.   The most recent Tartine Book by baker Chad Robertson contains an extended digression comparing the fermentation cycle of lambics with the much shorter cycle of naturally risen breads:

"Lambic brewers are conducting a symphony of natural processes, acting as both catalysts and shepherds in an attempt to achieve the desired outcome. The notion that the pattern has a specific sequence was a revelation; there was surely something valuable in this discovery related to bread. Lambic beers typically go through at least five distinct phases of fermentation. Unlike more common styles of beer where the flavor character is mostly determined by the types of grain and hops used, lambic’s complex character is shaped in large part by the wild fermentation, which changes with seasonal temperature fluctuations among other things. The origins of the lambic process and the way our bread was taking shape were closely related. Over time, the concept of sequential phases of fermentation would illuminate parts of my bread-baking process that had been invisible before.
...
Tartine bread goes through a process closer to a 24-hour cycle than the 24-month cycle of lambic beer. With bread I am working with fewer dominant types of wild microorganisms than the extraordinarily diverse process that produces lambic. But as much as I try to control the process on the one hand, letting the wild fermentation go through very active phases to develop depths of flavor is key to my approach. Minimal manipulation in the early stages—to allow maximum expression and transformation wrought by the microflora—is always the goal."

But there is also a more mundane overlap between baking and brewing in the ingredients its useful to have on hand.  Since I don't have a flour mill, in my case this is limited to raw grains that I can crush for brewing, or use whole or coarsely chopped in baking: things like spelt, rye, buckwheat, etc.  I confess I enjoy the thought that I can use these grains to make either beer or bread: it fits with the no doubt romanticized picture of traditional farmhouse ales, brewed with whatever grains were on hand, all of which might also be put to various other uses around the farm.

Whole spelt can be used in a variety of ways in bread, but it must first be rehydrated one way or another.  This achieves two important goals: softening the grain so that it won't be too tough in the final bread, but also beginning some enzyme activity (similar to what goes on in the mash) that make various minerals nutritionally available and begins breaking down starches into sugars.  One way to achieve this is by making a "soaker", hydrating coarsely ground grains in water overnight.  I've tried this a few times, but more recently I've been germinating the grains first by briefly hydrating them, the leaving them to sprout for a day or two (this is the process that is initiated and then halted in malting grains).  One final technique, which I haven't tried, involves basically mashing the grains or boiling them into a gelatinized porridge, then using this as part of the dough for the final bread.  This last method is closest to how we use these grains in beer.

I've used raw spelt three or four times when brewing, usually as a substitute for wheat malt in saisons and farmhouse beers.  I don't know if I could pick out differences between the two in separate beers, but I have noticed that spelt seems to improve the perception of body without being quite as silky as oats---something that can be useful when you're trying to make beers that are dry but not too thin or astringent.  The spelt saison I brewed with The Yeast Bay's saison blend remains one of my favourite home brews, and I recently added dry hops to another bitter, hoppy saison brewed with spelt which was also tasting very promising.

When using raw spelt in small quantities  (less that 5% of the grist), I usually just mash it along with everything else, though perhaps taking the time to change the gap on my Corona mill and give it a finer crush (raw grains are often difficult to mill).  When using a higher proportion, I now do a cereal mash with the spelt and a small amount of base malt. As I understand it, spelt should gelatinize at mash temperatures, making a cereal mash unnecessary; but the one time I tried to skip this step, my efficiency dipped considerably.  It may be that crushing the spelt more finely (or using rolled or even malted spelt) would have facilitated gelatinization, so that more of the starch was converted and my efficiency remained the same.  However since its raw spelt I use in baking, and the cereal mash isn't too much extra work, this is the process I've settled on.

Cereal Mash

You can find good accounts of the science behind cereal mashing online; my process is fairly simple.  I draw out a quart or two of water from my main kettle, add the crushed spelt along with a handful of base malt, and heat it to around 150°F; I hold it here for about 10 minutes, then bring the mixture to a boil, stirring it regularly for anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes, until I have a thick and gloopy porridge.  This then goes back into my main kettle, which by this point is on its way up to strike-in temperatures.  I add the rest of the grist, and mash as normal.

I'll post tasting notes and recipe for my most recent spelt saison in a few weeks when its bottled and carbonated.  In the meantime, with the weekend coming up, I'm finally back to brewing again!

Process: Brewing with English Yeast Strains

I've ended up taking a few weeks off from brewing this month, and since J and I are headed up to Toronto next week, it will probably be at least a fortnight before I brew again.  I have a couple of tasting note posts scheduled for while I'm away, but it will be a a bit longer before I have any interesting brew days to write about.

Part of the reason for this is that I'm in between pitches of yeast, and it didn't seem worthwhile to grow one up when I knew I'd be travelling.  Why should that make a difference?  Well, I realized that it all comes down to the way I brew when I'm using English yeast, and I thought it would be fun to write a quick post about my process.  Maybe its uninteresting for others, but I for one quite like hearing people discuss how they go about their brewing.

When I'm doing English beers (and some Belgian ones), my ideal process is to grow up a pitch of a top-cropping strain, and then brew with it once a week until its gone through at least three or four generations.  This only works when I know that I'll be able to brew regularly over a several weeks (so in the summer, and maybe at the start of a school semester).  When I have this kind of space, I brew each weekend, cropping mid-week for the next batch, and keeping this going as long as I need to.

Its fun to be able to trace the lineage of a particular pitch of yeast that's gone through this cycle.  For example, early this summer I grew up a pitch of Wyeast 1469 from a slant.  It was first pitched into this pale mild, and cropped a few days later; after that I brewed two bitters back to back on subsequent weekends, pitching from one to the next  (I haven't written about these yet); the yeast from the last bitter was pitched into Old World's Mantra; some of the yeast cropped from there was pitched into the Keeping Porter, while the rest was grown up on a stir-plate and pitched into Stingo, along with more yeast cropped from the Keeping Porter.

So you can see that the original gravity of the beers increases steadily, with early beers acting as starters to ensure I have healthy yeast.  Since I'm top-cropping, I don't worry too much about the colour or hopping rates in the beer I'm cropping from, as the yeast that I skim off is almost completely free of trub (it may be coated in hop oils, but I haven't had any trouble with this).

I haven't done this consistently enough with particular strains to have any information about how flavours vary between pitches, though I have noticed that attenuation will often increase steadily over several generations.  One thing that has probably been very inconsistent up to now is the pitching rate across batches: I try to pitch roughly the same volume of slurry by eye in beers of the same gravity, but without taking cell-counts or actually measuring it out I suspect I am often over-pitching (remember this is thick, fresh, and healthy slurry).

That should change in future: a fellow home-brewer who runs one of the labs on campus recently told me that his old school was selling some microscopes, so I asked him to pick one up for me.  Once I get the hang of using it, I'll be able to do cell counts for the slurry I'm repitching.  It will be interesting to see what these show about the cell numbers and viability in top-cropped yeast, especially compared to the washed yeast I use in my saisons.

I'm curious as to whether other home brewers think about their process in the same way.  Part of the fun for me is thinking out a series of beers for a particular yeast.  I can tell you now that the next strains I grow up after our trip will be Wyeast 1028 and 1318 (I'm not sure which I'll do first)---and I have a pretty good idea of the sequence of beers I'll brew with each, which is to say that I have at least four beers in mind, and a couple more possibilities that I could work into the sequence if I think I'll have time. (E.g. 1028 goes Ordinary Bitter, Bitter, Summer Ale, IPA, and maybe a stock ale at the end.)

A final note: this is very different from the way I use saison yeasts.  Since these are rarely good top-croppers, and often fairly poor at flocculating, I usually harvest them from one of the clean Better Bottles that I use as bright tanks / secondary fermentation vessels.  In the right context, this process has its advantages too: it means I can wait longer in between brews, and keep a single pitch going over many months.  Obviously brewing with mixed cultures works differently too.

In Perpetuum: Pale Sour Ale

Brewing on cheap equipment in a rented apartment constrains my process in various ways.  For the most part these are constraints I’m happy to work with, but one thing that has started to bother me in some instances is my small batch size.  It doesn’t matter so much in the running beers I make, since the turn around is supposed to be quick; but it can be disheartening to wait a year-plus for a batch of sour beer, only to find that if you let yourself enjoy it freely its almost gone a few months later.  What’s more, it limits the amount of beer I have lying around for other blending projects.  Dedicating 1.5 litres of sour to blend with a batch of saison amounts to reducing my batch size by almost 10%, which in a small batch is a significant loss.

I’ve taken various steps to remedy this.  The biggest has been getting a pipeline of sours going, so that I always have new batches ready to bottle; but even here I find that there’s something frustrating about starting from scratch each time, knowing that it will be a year until you get to drink this beer, and that it will probably be almost all gone in less than half that time.  This is part of what drew me to using small proportions of these older beers to cut younger beers, or to inoculate new batches, as it provides a way of extending each batch further.  Starting some kind of solera-system seemed like a natural extension of this.

Of course the idea of using a solera-style system for brewing beer is not a new one (even among home brewers), but people have started to do some very interesting things with it in recent years.  For instance, Michael Tonsmeire has shared lots of information about the the wine barrel soleras he shares with Nathan Zender.  They have a great set-up, pulling around 20 gallons every year, and then splitting this beer to treat in various different ways: e.g. adding hops, flowers, or fruit.  It provides an endless base for experimentation.

Most versions I’ve read about are done on a scale that would be impossible in my space, since I can’t house a barrel, and brewing 60 gallons of wort 3 gallons at a time would be a Herculean task.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t apply the same ideas on a smaller scale.  Brewing sixty gallons might be impossible, but I can easily do six gallons to fill a large carboy in a double brew day.  In fact, if I had 3 gallons of aged sour lying around, I’d only need a single batch to have something already well under way…

So that’s what I did. The base beer here is an 11 month old version of the Flanders Pale Ale recipe from Wild Brews. It was initially fermented with a new pack of Roeselare blend, and had about 10ml of ECY20 added to it after a few months in primary.  The beer has a lovely gentle brett funk at the moment---lots of hay and light farmyard---but, as is often the case with a first pitch of Roeselare, its still not very sour at all (see photo).   The recipe for the younger beer is slightly different (I’ll put it at the end of the post), and I intend to stick with this one in future. My hope is that there is a healthy array of brett and LAB at large in the aged beer, and that the addition of fresh beer (which finished relatively high at around 1.014) will provide them with what they need to increase the overall acidity.

This week I combined both 3 gallon batches in to a 6 gallon carboy bought specifically for this purpose. I’m planning to run this beer in a proper solera-style system: pulling out three gallons into another carboy in 9-12 months, and topping up the original with 3 gallons of fresh beer; then perhaps even pulling from the 3 gallons to fill smaller jugs 9-12 months after that, and refilling each vessel with beer from the next youngest batch.  Eventually, if I stay put long enough, I’ll have a range of blends at different ages: according to Michael Tonsemeire’s solera spreadsheet, assuming I pull half of each vessel every nine months, the three stages should eventually converge on 0.7, 2.2, and 3.7 years---though I doubt I’ll stay in this apartment long enough to see that happen. 

I’m thinking of this as the base for further beers, rather than something to be drank in its own right---something I might use to cut younger saisons, or add fruit or dry hops to.  For instance, the smaller volumes in the oldest vessel would be perfect for adding acidity too a blended sour or a saison. Based on my experience so far, it only takes about 15% to add noticeable acidity to a clean beer.

In fact, if this system works well, I’m thinking of trying it with other beers too: perhaps doing a double batch of a dark beer in another 6 gallon carboy, and running it in the same way with pulls every 9-12 months, so that I always have a range of light and dark sours on hand for blending.  (Here I’m again inspired by New Belgium’s process with their light and dark beers, Felix and Oscar, which you can read about in American Sour Beers.)

Recipe:

Measured O.G.	1.057
Measured F.G.
ABV.
Mash:	156°F
Malt:
42.9% Pilsner
42.9% 2-Row
10.7% Flaked Wheat
3.6% Flaked Oats
Hops:
EKG	60 min	21.4 IBUs	(25g@ 4.29%)
Yeast:
WY3522

Brew Day: Pale Mild

Once summer hits its stride here in Chicago, home-brewing in an apartment without air-conditioning becomes increasingly difficult.  Its not just the constant worrying about the various beers I have aging without temperature control.  There’s also the fact that its difficult to justify having a pot full of wort at a rolling boil in the kitchen when the apartment is already hot and humid.  So, for the next few months at least, I probably won’t be able to brew as much as I would like---and since I already have a lot of saisons and sours in the pipeline, I’ve decided to focus on the drink I love the most: pale, bitter English beer.

This brew day was actually a warm up for all of this.  For one thing, the pale mild I brewed is really an over-sized yeast starter to make sure I’ll have healthy pitches of the WY1469 for the next month or two.  But I also wanted a simple brew day so that I could begin focusing on various changes in my process, all made with a view to improving the overall quality of my beers.

I think I’ve been making solid beers without obvious off-flavours for at least a year now, and over the last few months there’s been a few standouts that I’ve been really happy with.  But there’s plenty of room for improvement, and since I think I have fermentation under control I’ve begun to focus more closely again on the production of wort.  Purchasing a pH meter a few months ago has given me a window into my mashes that I’ve never had before, and as a result I’ve begun to pay closer attention to things like water additions and mash pH.  But since I’ve recently been brewing beers that pick up acidity from bacteria during fermentation, its been hard to tell how much of a difference these changes have made.  Hopefully coming back to English styles for a while will help me to better understand how water chemistry and wort composition affect my final beer.

To help me focus on this, I’ve designed a brew day log sheet to keep track of the various additions and measurements I make along the way.  When I first started brewing I tried using some of the excellent brewing logs available online (e.g. Randy Mosher’s or Kai Troester’s), but since I didn’t really understand some of what I was recording and the rest of the brew day was still new to me, it was easy to lose focus and end up with half-completed sheets.  As I got more comfortable with my process I started making more of an effort to record things in BeerSmith, but my computer is at the opposite end of the house from the kitchen, so its still easy to let thing slip. 

The advantage of designing my own sheet, rather than going back to using Kai Troester’s, is that I can structure it around my own process during brew day.  I wrote the sheet by sitting down and going through the whole process in my imagination, working out the points at which it would be helpful to have measurements or records.  I then wrote out a very basic document, arranged in a linear order to match what I did at each point in my brew days, so that it would be easy to remember to make and log measurements at each point.  Inevitably I thought up various modifications as I brewed today, and I’m sure I think up more over the coming months: but as things stand I should now have accurate information about things like water additions and final water profile, mash pH, boil pH, pre-, mid-, and post-boil gravities, boil-off, etc, where before at least some of this information was always missing.  Hopefully this will put me in a better position to understand the changes that affect my beers.  (I’m happy to send a copy of my log sheet to anyone who wants it, or to post it here---but I think it makes more sense to come up with your own version based on your understanding of your brew day process.)

Anyway, enough waffling.  The brew day went smoothly enough, though I did have trouble getting the wort down to pitching temps.  It’s perhaps worth commenting on the beer itself.  Pale milds are a rarity in an already rare style (although back in Liverpool I could reliably find Timothy Taylor’s Golden Best at The Caledonia).  The recipe is my own, and I make no claims for its authenticity or quality(this is my first time brewing it).  One thing I will say is that its interesting to compare popular homebrew recipes for Mild to historical or even modern commercial versions.  Home brewers tend to include large amounts of crystal malt in their milds, in quantities that add significant body and sweetness to the final beer.  Historical and commercial recipes, on the other hand, often include a large proportion of adjuncts like dark brewing sugars and flaked maize, which are usually understood as ingredients that will lighten a beer and help it dry out.  It looks like we’re brewing completely different beers.

I’m not going to suggest that one approach is better than the other, though I have my preference.  The home brewer approach is no doubt partly a result of attempts to add body and flavour to these low-gravity beers.  Traditional milds have the advantage of being served from a cask fresh, at cellar temperature, and with low carbonation, all of of which tend to impart a perception of increased body, and help to bring out subtler flavours that are lost when the beer is cold.  This is difficult to achieve if you’re serving beers from the fridge via a keg or bottle, so home brewers have to take different means to the same end.  However, I think some American home brewers also tend to think of milds as sweet beers (malty and sweet are often equated with each other), and this, in my experience at least, is somewhat inaccurate.  The milds I’ve had back home are all refreshing, light, drinkable beers, neither cloyingly sweet nor pretending to clock in at a higher gravity than they have.  That, at any rate, is the kind of mild I’ve enjoyed drinking, which is why I’ve included both invert sugar and corn in this recipe.

Recipe:

Measured O.G.	1.034
Measured F.G.
ABV.
Mash:	154°F
Malt:
48.9% Mild Malt	(Paul’s)
36.5% Pearl Malt	(Fawcett)
4.9% Flaked Corn
9.8% Invert #2
Hops:
Fuggles (U.S.)	60	20.4 IBUs	(25g @ 4.1%)
WGV	15	2.8 IBUs	(10g @ 5.3%)
Yeast:
WY1469 (West Yorkshire)